The Ambivalences of Don Giovanni

I have always loved classical music and recently, I developed a fascination for opera. Despite not being able to understand the lyrics - although most indoor venues have closed caption screens to translate the words - the music is always fabulous. Especially when written by the musical genius Mozart.

“Viva la libertà!” sings Don Giovanni as his guests arrive for a festive evening, and because the opera was composed in 1787, during the Age of Enlightenment and on the eve of the French Revolution, it is not unreasonable to ask what kind of liberty he has in mind. Is it the sort of political liberty that was set forth in the United States Constitution, also written in 1787, or the social emancipation of peasants from feudal aristocratic oppression that was much discussed in Mozart’s Vienna in the 1780s? Don Giovanni has no hesitations about taking advantage of his own aristocratic privilege and power, but he also sponsors celebrations that democratically include the local peasantry. Nobles and peasants, masters and servants, meet in the gorgeous musical ensembles of the opera and forge unexpected harmonies and alliances. Don Giovanni welcomes into his palace the three masked visitors who are his enemies, and they graciously echo his toast in its six-note syncopated march and even harmonize with him, though their vision of liberty must be very different from his. One aspect of his operatic power is his ability to seduce others into singing his tune.

Don Giovanni is certainly a revolutionary figure, conceived in a revolutionary decade, and beyond the political and social dimensions of liberty he embodies an erotic dream of freedom from all restraint, from all convention, from all religion and morality. He is the operatic model of an 18th-century libertine.

The man who actually lived this life was not Mozart, a devoted husband to his wife, Constanze, but may have been his Venetian librettist, the ex-priest Lorenzo Da Ponte, who had been banished from the city for his sexual escapades (while he was still a priest). Above all, however, it was the Venetian Giacomo Casanova who defined the erotic career of an 18th-century libertine, recording his conquests not in an abbreviated catalog but in 12 volumes of detailed and uninhibited memoirs. It is possible that Casanova was in Prague in October 1787 when Don Giovanni had its premiere there, and he could have discussed the opera with Mozart and Da Ponte as they applied the finishing touches to a masterpiece that he might have taken as a portrait of himself.

Don Giovanni has been a fundamental part of the operatic repertory since 1787, but it has always been morally disturbing, even though Don Giovanni is dragged down to hell at the end. Certainly, it is a disturbing opera today.

A fascinating new book by the musicologist Richard Will, Don Giovanni Captured, reviews and analyzes the history of recordings of the opera, dating back to the age of early phonograph records at the beginning of the 20th century. While performances remind us of the charismatic power that Don Giovanni can still exercise from the stage, Will’s book conjures the long history of that power as exercised in private domestic spaces through records, CDs, and videos. It further suggests that one kind of liberty with regard to Don Giovanni is an astonishing liberty of interpretation across the decades of recording, which has allowed for this work and character to be treated with the greatest variety of tempos, dynamics, rhythms, and ornamentations. Don Giovanni “captured” (in recordings) turns out to be a more elusive, amorphous figure than perhaps we imagined.

Will’s study, at the intersection of musicology, sound studies, and the history of technology, begins with the 78 rpm records of the early 20th century, which could play for three to four and a half minutes and thus could contain at most one aria on each side; he proceeds to the advent after World War II of the 33 1/3 rpm LP, which could play for 22 minutes per side and made it easier to record complete operas - eventually with stereo sound - and finally to the new clarity of digital technology on even longer-playing CDs. The final section of the book turns to video recordings, which permit the home listener to appreciate not just the composer, conductor, and singers but also the directorial and theatrical experience.

Edison invented the cylinder phonograph in 1877, but the operatic recording industry was launched in 1902 with Enrico Caruso, who went on to sell a million copies of “Vesti la giubba” from Pagliacci in that decade. The early world of Don Giovanni excerpts on 78s offered profiles of individual singers and characters from the opera. The technology, however, could not convey Mozart’s innovative operatic genius: the construction of long ensembles with multiple parts.

Recording a complete Don Giovanni on 78s was inevitably very rare. Reviewing 370 early Don Giovanni recordings, Will constructs a pie chart to demonstrate that the serenade constituted almost a quarter of recorded Don Giovanni excerpts.

In 1904 the French baritone Victor Maurel (Verdi’s first Iago and first Falstaff) recorded Don Giovanni’s serenade. Will notes the way that Maurel slows the tempo within individual phrases for emphasis and expression, adding ornamental notes and portamento - sliding between pitches - in accordance with the vocal practice of his 19th-century career. The Italian baritone Mattia Battistini recorded the serenade at around the same time, in an erotically mannered style that we would probably call crooning, and with an unwritten high note at the end sung almost falsetto; his version of the serenade was supposedly described as an “offense against public morals.” Many of these recordings can now be found on YouTube, and I found it illuminating to listen to them on Amazon while reading the book.

Antonio Scotti - almost 20 years younger than Maurel and 10 years younger than Battistini - recorded the serenade during the same decade (with an aria from Falstaff on the flip side of the disc) and gave a much more evenly measured performance, elegant rather than excessively expressive. Maurel was still singing Don Giovanni in New York in the 1890s, but Scotti took over the role at the Met in 1899 and sang it later under the baton of Gustav Mahler. Will argues that by the time Ezio Pinza, the great Don Giovanni of the 1930s, recorded the serenade, it was the steady forcefulness of the voice, maintaining a regular beat, that made basso masculinity into a seductive force in its own right without expressive tricks or quirks. Will further suggests that this might be understood in relation to a new Hemingway-style modernist masculinity.

The duettino was short enough to fit on a 78, and a recording from 1908 pairs the elegant Scotti with Geraldine Farrar, whom Will notes was already a modern Zerlina, frankly sensual and unintimidated, not just responding to the Don but matching him phrase for phrase. Farrar sang the role in Salzburg in 1906, for the Mozart sesquicentennial, with Mahler present, and there was some debate about whether the 6/8 coda really required an acceleration of tempo - which was not marked in Mozart’s autograph score. Over the course of the next generation the tempo of the coda, Will observes, increased less and less. By 1954 Siepi and Erna Berger barely speeded up at all, and the duet finished more as a romantic idyll than a rushed surrender.

The dilemma of “vorrei e non vorrei” was self-evident and comfortably comical for Da Ponte and Mozart in 1787, but it has been dramatically troubling from the 19th century to the present, as it creates ambiguity around the question of sexual consent in an opera that also involves sexual assault. More generally troubling is the perverse blend of comedy and drama, of opera buffa and opera seria (the crucial 18th-century genres), with a character like Leporello clearly intended as comical even as he brutally recites the catalog of Don Giovanni’s conquests to Donna Elvira, one of his humiliated victims.

By contrast the characters of Donna Anna and Don Ottavio seem to move in a separate sphere, the world of opera seria, as noble people pursuing noble emotions: Donna Anna seeks revenge on Don Giovanni for attempting to rape her and then murdering her father the Commendatore, while Don Ottavio seeks to assist her in the hope that she will eventually find the peace of mind to marry him. Yet directors and critics have long wondered whether she might actually prefer the outrageous Don Giovanni to the overly devoted Don Ottavio, whose proposals of marriage she continually defers. The role of Donna Anna, sometimes performed as a model of Mozartean purity.

Don Ottavio often appears as the tenor foil to Don Giovanni’s aggressive baritone swagger: the celebrated Mozart scholar Edward Dent described Don Ottavio following Donna Anna around “like a little dog.”

Donna Elvira has been seduced and abandoned by Don Giovanni before the opera begins, and she joins with Donna Anna and Don Ottavio to take down the libertine, thus participating in their opera seria world. Yet there is every reason to think that Mozart and Da Ponte regarded her as a comic character, ready to fall in love with Don Giovanni all over again at the slightest suggestion of his possible interest.

At the opening of act 2 there is a disturbingly beautiful nocturnal trio, “Ah taci, ingiusto core,” in which Elvira on her balcony is courted deceptively by both Don Giovanni and Leporello, who raise her hopes while luring her down, merely as a distraction so that Don Giovanni can serenade and seduce her maid. In the meantime, however, the trio, marked andantino, in A major and gently rippling 6/8 time, creates something of real gorgeousness out of the malicious farce. Don Giovanni shifts into C major to rehearse the serenade (which he will sing to the maid in the next scene), and then, returning to A major, and accompanied by a wind ensemble of flute, clarinet, and bassoon, Don Giovanni and Leporello harmonize with Elvira so marvelously that the audience almost believes in the romance - as Elvira certainly does. This is already the unsettling world of Così fan tutte, Mozart and Da Ponte’s next masterpiece, in which the composer’s loveliest music is deployed in a scenario of cruel deception throughout the opera, as if to suggest that all our fantasies of romance are doomed to disillusionment but cherishable nevertheless.

Don Giovanni, an opera that is almost entirely set at night, is certainly a dark comedy, if it is a comedy at all, and Will’s study of its exceptionally varied recording history suggests all the different shades of light and darkness that constitute the moral chiaroscuro of this elusive work.

This is an opera about all kinds of ambivalence - “vorrei e non vorrei” - and perhaps provokes in the audience some corresponding ambivalence about the opera itself, even as we are seduced by the astonishing richness of Mozart’s musical genius. Though Don Giovanni is condemned to death and damnation at the end of every performance, he returns to the stage (as well as the recording industry) decade after decade.

He has not finished with us yet.